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Part IV—Voicing Wars

Warring Claims: Victorian Poetry and Conflict1

Matthew Bevis

Résumé

The First World War is often seen as heralding a break between Victorian and modern conceptions of conflict, and critics have tended to opt for a series of neat poetic oppositions—the glorious versus the gruesome, the heroic versus the hellish, the romantic versus the realistic. One need not deny the differences between writing before and after the First World War without feeling that such oppositions do a disservice to the complexities of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century war poetry, to the former in particular. Victorian war poetry has frequently been belittled or ignored by critics, usually by way of dismissive references to Tennyson serving as prelude to discussion of the poets of the Great War. Even Malvern Van Wyk Smith, in what remains the only book-length study of the subject, confines himself to the Anglo-Boer War and closes with the assertion that “after the Boer War, war poetry could no longer be merely a sub-department of patriotic verse.” But war poetry was not “merely” this before the Boer War. This article examines how Victorian poets represented and explored the complexities of war; it considers the writings of Browning, Arnold, Tennyson, Meredith, Morris, Kipling, Hardy, Housman, and others, and demonstrates how the richness of this body of work offered itself to modern poets as both bequest and as monitory force.

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  • 1 ’This article first appeared as ’Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of Br (...)
  • 2 See The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. III, ed. Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler (Oxford: Claren (...)

1Victorian war poetry is often engaged in conflict with its own form, rather than with an external enemy. Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics (1842) begins with a series of apparently belligerent “Cavalier Tunes”, but readers approach them armed with a note from the volume’s advertisement. There the poet observes that most of the poems are “though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.”2 “Cavalier”, then, may be a lyrical-dramatic pun: the soldier-singers are proud to be voicing their support for Charles I, but the poet who creates these voices asks us to consider whether they are themselves cavalier. A later poem in the collection, “Incident of the French Camp”, focuses on the potential consequences of such fighting talk. The speaker recalls a moment when Napoleon’s army, pursuing the Austrians, stormed Ratisbon under the command of one of the Emperor’s most renowned generals, Jean Lannes. Napoleon looks on:

  • 3 Browning, “Incident of the French Camp”, ibid., 197.

Just as perhaps he mused “My plans
     ‘That soar, to earth may fall
Let once my army-leader Lannes
     ‘Waver at yonder wall,’
Out” twixt the battery-smokes there flew
     A rider, bound on bound
Full-galloping; nor bridle drew
     Until he reached the mound.
Then off there flung in smiling joy,
     And held himself erect
By just his horse’s mane, a boy:
     You hardly could suspect—
(So tight he kept his lips compressed,
     Scarce any blood came through)
You looked twice ere you saw his breast
     Was all but shot in two.3

2The enjambed lines in the first stanza work with the rider to accentuate his pace, but in the second they shift from stridency to hesitancy. We are asked to glance back even as we move forward. “He held himself erect” initially sounds proud, but the next line, in telling us how he did so, comes as a shock (the “rider” also becomes a more vulnerable “boy”). You hardly could suspect him, this boy, “So tight he kept his lips compressed” (a soldierly example to others of tight-lipped trustworthiness), until, that is, you come to suspect something else as the sentence makes its inexorable progress. The penultimate line makes one last grasp at a dignified diction (“ere”, “breast”) before the close of the stanza brings the incident into clearer focus. The poem ends when we are told that “the boy fell dead”; while Napoleon was dwelling on whether his plans might fall to earth, the poem was contemplating another kind of falling.

  • 4 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918; repr. London: Penguin, 1986), 2 (...)
  • 5 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), (...)

3The Victorians are not often credited with an attentiveness to the realities of warfare. They have frequently been taken to task for keeping their own lips compressed and for refusing to dwell on the bloodier side of conflict. Their war-tunes have been heard as cavalier, and critical study has been focused instead on the rude awakenings of the twentieth century. Never such innocence again. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, published in the final year of the Great War, marks the divide. Strachey’s father had been a general in the army, but the son was a conscientious objector, and such objections can be heard in the icy briskness of his book’s final sentence. Recalling how General Gordon’s death in Khartoum was avenged by Kitchener’s army at Omdurman in 1898, Strachey observes: “it had all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Evelyn Baring.”4 This parody of a happy ending is meant as the final nail in the coffin of Victorian imperial confidence, and Strachey’s view has held sway in subsequent literature. As Samuel Hynes observed more recently, the Great War “brought to an end the life and values of Victorian and Edwardian England.”5

  • 6 See, for instance, Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, 2nd edn (London: Macmill (...)
  • 7 M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), (...)
  • 8 “War poetry” is not accorded a chapter (or even an index citation) in either Joseph Bristow (ed.), (...)
  • 9 John Peck, War, The Army and Victorian Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. xiii.

4This general judgment has been echoed in appreciations of war poetry. As the First World War comes to be seen as heralding a break between Victorian and modern conceptions of conflict, so a series of neat poetic oppositions emerges—the glorious versus the gruesome, the heroic versus the hellish, the romantic versus the realistic. One need not deny the differences between writing before and after the First World War without feeling that such oppositions do a disservice to the complexities of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century war poetry, to the former in particular. Victorian war poetry has frequently been belittled or ignored by critics, usually by way of dismissive references to Tennyson serving as prelude to discussion of the poets of the Great War.6 Even Malvern Van Wyk Smith, in what remains the only book-length study of the subject, confines himself to the Anglo-Boer War and closes with the assertion that “after the Boer War, war poetry could no longer be merely a sub-department of patriotic verse.”7 But war poetry was not “merely” this before the Boer War. Such statements have not helped to generate interest in the subject. It is not given attention in essay collections,8 and a recent study of Victorian war literature sidelines poetry on the grounds that “so much of it seems little more than a string of patriotic slogans.”9 This sense of Victorian war poetry as a synonym for victorious war poetry needs to be reconsidered. Like the speaker in Browning’s poem, whose responsible gaze insists on looking twice, Victorian poets often require us to see double.

I

  • 10 Edward Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World; from Marathon to Waterloo, vol. I (London: Be (...)
  • 11 See Robert Giddings, Imperial Echoes: Eye-Witness Accounts of Victoria’s Little Wars (London: Coope (...)
  • 12 See Max Arthur, Symbol of Courage: A History of the Victoria Cross (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 200 (...)
  • 13 Wilfred Owen, quoted in Hynes, A War Imagined, 246.
  • 14 Punch 28 (17 February 1855), 64.

5In Fifteen Decisive Battles (1851), Edward Creasy noted that “It is an honourable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilized states with increasing aversion . . .Yet it cannot be denied that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of carnage.”10 The interest was reflected in sales of Creasy’s book (a Victorian best-seller, it was reprinted thirty-eight times before 1894). Moreover, the “scenes” were not merely historical; every year of Victoria’s reign, her soldiers were fighting a series of “little wars” in some part of the world.11 The perplexed Victorian fascination with warfare is also evident in a group of phrases that, according to the OED, made its way into the language during the period. In addition to “war-footing” (1847), “war-code” (1853), “war-news” (1857), and “war-machines” (1881), the dictionary cites a collection of words that “denote[s] works of art, etc., of which the subject is war”: “war-ballad” (1854), “war poem” (1857), “war story” (1864), “war pictures” (1883), “war artist” (1890), “war-plays” (1896), “war films” (1897). The interest in war did not preclude a critical engagement with it; even the advent of the Victoria Cross (the first medal in England to recognize acts of bravery independent of rank)12 raised some awkward questions. When Wilfred Owen snapped, “The Victorian Cross! I covet it not. Is it not Victorian? yah! pah!,”13 he was not the first to announce a refusal to be beguiled by that age’s pageantry. On hearing the news of its introduction in 1855, Punch offered its own commentary by having two shivering soldiers on the front line in the Crimea discuss the VC: “‘Well, Jack! Here’s good news from Home. We’re to have a medal.” “That’s very kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on?’”14

  • 15 Matthew Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature”, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, (...)
  • 16 Arnold, ibid., 24.

6The unsettling aspects of war found their way into poetic theory and practice even as Victorian writers sought to distance themselves from the fray. In his inaugural lecture in the Oxford Poetry Chair in 1857, Matthew Arnold observed that one of the chief characteristics of “a modern age, of an age of advanced civilization, is the banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed from the intercourse of civil life . . . Wars are still carried on; but within the limits of civil life a circle has been formed within which man can move securely, and develop the arts of peace uninterruptedly.”15 Accompanying this modern spirit is “the supreme characteristic of all: the intellectual maturity of man himself; the tendency to observe facts with a critical spirit.”16 As an early example of such reflective, unwarlike modernity, Arnold cites Grecian society and its expressive flowering in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. However, as Arnold continues, the “arts of peace” are not allowed to remain uninterrupted:

  • 17 Arnold, ibid., 32.

In the case of Thucydides I called attention to the fact that his habit of mind, his mode of dealing with questions, were modern; that they were those of an enlightened, reflecting man among ourselves . . .The predominance of thought, of reflection, in modern epochs is not without its penalties . . .it has produced a state of feeling unknown to the less enlightened but perhaps healthier epochs—the feeling of depression, the feeling of ennui. Depression and ennui; these are the characteristics stamped on how many of the representative works of modern times!17

  • 18 Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems” (1853), The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam All (...)
  • 19 Arnold, “Dover Beach”, ibid., 254.

7This passage echoes Arnold’s argument in his 1853 Preface, where modernity’s reflective powers lead to the disabling “dialogue of the mind with itself.”18 If the civilizing process paradoxically creates the conditions in which it may not be able to flourish, then those “ensigns of war” are not quite banished, but become part of the warring psyche. War is not, then, what modern life avoids, but part of a description of what it embodies. “Dover Beach” (1851) tries to form a circle within which man can move securely, outside the realm of war, yet from its opening this lyrical “art of peace” is haunted by its demons as the speaker addresses his interlocutor: “On the French coast the light/Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand.”19 In the 1850s, this light was not only part of a picturesque scene, but also a glint of menace (as the invasion scares of that decade would show). The poem ends:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  • 20 Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature”, Complete Prose, vol. I, 28.

8The source for this passage is Thucydides’ description of the Battle of Epipolae in his History of the Peloponnesian War, where he recounts a night battle in which the Athenians became disoriented and came to blows with one another. The source that, for Arnold, was meant to enshrine “that noble serenity which always accompanies true insight”20 is harnessed here to express a sense of the modern mind’s loss of bearings. The speaker’s aim is to draw attention to a bower sheltering him and his beloved from the warring world outside, but “swept” might refer to “we” as well as to the “plain”. That is, the poem closes not just with the sense that “it’s us against them”, but also with the more disturbing suggestion that the couple may be swept up in it all by being against each other. Like many Victorian lyrics, “Dover Beach” is a war poem of sorts, not only because the threat of war hovers in and around its edges, but also because war is part of the fabric of its most intimate human imaginings.

  • 21 Matthew Campbell, “Poetry and War”, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (...)
  • 22 Arnold, “Preface”, Poems of Arnold, 657 and 659.

9The complex debt that Arnold owes to Thucydides bears on the question of the classical inheritance of Victorian war poetry. This inheritance has often been cited as another marker of the Victorian/modern divide. Victorian poetics is seen as responsive to an epic tradition that is said to endorse militaristic values, while twentieth-century war poetry is, as Matthew Campbell puts it, “a poetry which no longer feels that it can sing in celebration of arms and the man.”21 There is some truth in this distinction, but it should also be noted that the celebrations of classical epic are themselves equivocal. When Arnold in his Preface advocated a return to the classical simplicity of the Greek tradition and style as an escape from the luxuriant disease of modernity, he prescribed an avoidance of “contemporary allusions” and an emphasis on “action” rather than on appeals to “our transient feelings and interests.”22 The work that was meant to exemplify these critical principles was Sohrab and Rustum (1853), and—as many contemporary reviewers noted—the poem frequently borrowed from the structure and the style of the Iliad. And yet, Arnold’s borrowings give voice not to a Homeric championing of war, but to that side of Homer that Simone Weil so sensitively described. Speaking of “those few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the poem”, Weil observes:

  • 23 Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: (...)

The tradition of hospitality persists, even through several generations, to dispel the blindness of combat . . .Moments of grace are rare in the Iliad, but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again . . .Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps in poetry; the realities of war, never.23

  • 24 Weil, ibid., 189.

10Weil notes that “the brief evocations of the world of peace are felt as pain,”24 and these evocations are at the heart of Arnold’s debt to Homer. When Rustum mortally wounds his son Sohrab, the latter lies dying and announces that he pities his mother for her loss. As Rustum listens, combat gives way to thoughts of hospitality:

  • 25 Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum, Poems of Arnold, 345–46.

     he listened, plunged in thought:
And his soul set to grief, as the vast tide
Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore
At the full moon; tears gathered in his eyes;
For he remembered his early youth,
And all its bounding rapture; as, at dawn,
The shepherd from his mountain-lodge descries
A far, bright city, smitten by the sun,
Through many rolling clouds—so Rustum saw
His youth; saw Sohrab’s mother, in her bloom;
And that old king, her father, who loved well
His wandering guest, and gave him his fair child
With joy; and all the pleasant life they led,
They three, in that long-distant summer-time . . .25

  • 26 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 199 (...)

11The first simile makes grief feel like a homecoming, as if grief itself were a source of rest to a mind that has for so long attempted to resist it. The second, in comparing the warrior to the shepherd, evokes a dream of the pastoral world in which the only thing that smites is the sun (“smitten” here, with its suggestion of being enamoured, serves to bathe martial action in romantic yearning). Both similes are lingering dreams—precarious digressions from the realization that awaits the father, forlorn attempts to stay the flow of the action, for it is action that has brought the losses Rustum contemplates. These similes are emblems of the luxuriant modern style that Arnold wished to avoid, and such luxuries (and the brooding which accompanies them) frequently punctuate Sohrab and Rustum, turning it into a “modern” poem in its willingness to dwell on “the dialogue of the mind with itself” that war can produce. Indeed, the setting of the poem (two armies of Eastern troops, the Tartars and the Persians, face each other on the plains of the Oxus) is not as remote from “contemporary allusions” and “transient feelings and interests” as Arnold might wish to suggest. As Isobel Armstrong notes: “what could be more modern than this? The historical context of Arnold’s writing was the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the insecure status of Afghanistan and the new alignments of Britain, France and Russia, the nineteenth-century problem. The Crimean war was two years away, but the eastern question already cast shadows at the beginning of the 1850s.”26 Those shadows can be glimpsed in Sohrab and Rustum, a poem chastened by its own mixed allegiances, and enriched by its debt to a classical tradition that dwelt on the cost as well as on the honour of war.

  • 27 See Matthew Paul Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War (Michigan: UMI R (...)
  • 28 See Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey, The War Correspondents: The Crimean War (Stroud: Alan Sutton (...)
  • 29 William Howard Russell, in The Times (12 February 1855), 9.
  • 30 Russell, The Times (25 November 1854), 9.

12The fertile ambiguities of Arnold’s principles and practice cast their own shadows across the writing of the period, and the Crimean War was not one of those contemporary events or transient interests that poets felt themselves at liberty to pass over. In many ways, the Crimean conflict was a new kind of war. It was the first time that commissioned war artists accompanied a British army into the field, and the first conflict of European military powers to be recorded by camera. These developments encouraged a verisimilitude in battle-painting and other genres, fostering a shift from older heroic depictions to a more realistic portrayal of the battlefield.27 The war was also the first to make use of the telegraph, and to call upon the art of the war correspondent (unlike those in the Great War, these correspondents were subject to very little censorship).28 William Howard Russell, correspondent for The Times, proclaimed: “The only thing the partisans of misrule can allege is that we don’t ‘make things pleasant’ to the authorities, and that, amid the filth and starvation and deadly stagnation of the camp, we did not go about ‘babbling of green fields’, of present abundance, and of prospects of victory.”29 Much of Russell’s writing sets itself against babble, and reads like a description of the front line in the First World War: “the skies are black as ink—the wind is howling over the staggering tents—the trenches are turned into dykes— . . .men are out for twelve hours at a time . . .not a soul seems to care for their comfort or even for their lives.”30

  • 31 “War and Poetry”, Edinburgh Review 196 (July 1902), 53.
  • 32 Westland Marston, The Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade (London: Mitchell, 1855), 8.
  • 33 See Geoffrey Regan, Someone Had Blundered: A Historical Survey of Military Incompetence (London: Ba (...)

13As both these quotations suggest, The Times was a forum for many criticisms that would later be echoed during the Great War (for two criticisms in particular: the mismanagement of the army by an incompetent aristocracy, and the neglect of the rank-and-file by a corrupt officer class). Indeed, the war correspondents—described by one contemporary as ‘poetic writers of prose’31—might be seen as England’s first soldier poets. In a note to his poem The Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade, Westland Marston observed: “the masterly Records of the War which now appear in our crowded journals—records which are at once histories and poems—leave to formal poetry only this task—to adopt their descriptions and to develop their suggestions; to comment, as it were, upon their glorious texts.”32 These texts were “glorious” because they attended to something more than glory, and poets who adopted and developed newspaper copy were responding to a form of expression that questioned heroic conceptions of war even as it acknowledged a regard for their enduring value. Nowhere is this development more apparent than in the responses of Russell and Tennyson to one of the most renowned military blunders of the period, the charge of the Light Brigade.33

  • 34 T. S. Eliot, quoted in Dominic Hibberd (ed.), Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook (London: Ma (...)
  • 35 Russell, The Times (14 November 1854), 7.
  • 36 Trudi Tate, “On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade”, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (e (...)
  • 37 Tennyson, letter of 23 January 1855, probably to Sydney Dobell; see Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shan (...)

14T. S. Eliot once praised Herbert Read’s war poetry as “neither Romance nor Reporting . . .it has emotion as well as a version of things seen.”34 The first sentence of Russell’s report on the charge of the Light Brigade treads a fine line between Romance and Reporting: “If the exhibition of the most brilliant valour, of the excess of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected lustre on the best days of chivalry can afford full consolation for the disaster to-day, we can have no reason to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and barbarian enemy.”35 The “If” announces that this romantic vocabulary is under pressure; an “excess” of courage is not only courage, but also foolhardiness, and the progress of the sentence gives readers reasons to feel unconsoled (one might not regret a “loss”, but it is harder not to regret a “melancholy loss”). Tennyson famously adapted The Times reports when composing “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, but he kept their dual depiction of war as both ennobling and horrifying. As Trudi Tate has recently suggested, although “often regarded as a simple-minded piece of patriotism”, the poem “is in fact a subtle and even anguished reflection upon the Crimean war.”36 Around the time of composition the poet admitted that, despite his official position as Victoria’s Laureate, he was unable to sympathize “at this hour with any song of triumph when my heart almost bursts with indignation at the accursed mismanagement of our noble little army, that flower of men.”37 This indignation can be glimpsed in his poem:

  • 38 Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, The Poems of Tennyson, vol. II, ed. Christopher Ricks, (...)

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
     Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
     Rode the six hundred.
. . .
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
     All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
     Noble six hundred.38

15The soldiers made a charge, not a reply, and Tennyson’s poem, as if to make some form of reparation, does the opposite. The soldiers followed orders and asked no questions; the poem gives orders and poses questions (“Was there a man dismayed?” does not quite manage to be rhetorical). Part of its strength comes from the way in which Tennyson does not make the soldiers’ suffering feel like a mere inevitability (“Some one had blundered”), even though it acknowledges that the men had no choice (“theirs but to do and die”). The poem is at once drawn to honour the sacrifice they made, and angered by the necessity of having to honour this event at all, hence the reference to the “wild” charge, which is similar to Russell’s “excess of courage” (somewhere between a rebuke and a compliment), before the adjective is dropped a couple of lines later for the sake of good form. Contra Wilfrid Owen, this war poetry does not reside “in the pity”, for Tennyson is aware that to invite only pity may be to invite complacency. Rather, when we are told to “honour” the Light Brigade, the imperative signals not only the need for remembrance, but also for an answering action (to “honour” as one would honour a debt).

  • 39 Tennyson, quoted in Matthew Bevis (ed.), Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (Pickering (...)
  • 40 W. F. Rawnsley, quoted in Bevis (ed.), Lives, 83.

16The poem is one such action, and honours the men by refusing to stay silent about blunders. The piece was built on an adaptation of The Times report, which had referred to “some hideous blunder”; Tennyson re-shaped it to “Some one had blundered” and explained that “the line kept running in my head, and I kept saying it over and over till it shaped itself into the burden of the poem.”39 This “burden”—meaning both “that which is borne” and “the refrain or chorus of a song” (OED)—weighs heavy on the poem, for so insistent was this sound, and this military error, that the Laureate rhymed it with words that deviated from the Queen’s English (according to Tennyson’s friend, W. F. Rawnsley, “hundred” is pronounced “hunderd” in Lincolnshire).40 What we hear in these sounds, and in sounds that drum through the poem (“thundered”, “soldier”, “sabres”, “gunners”, “shattered”, “sundered”), is a ghost of the words “err” and “erred”. These whispers are the poem’s burden, words uttered under its breath, and echoed again in the line “All the world wondered”, where “wondered” condenses the poem’s mix of awestruck admiration and perplexed incredulity. It also carries within it the sound of the poem’s pride for the men alongside its awareness of the pointlessness of their death (“won”, “erred”). An exemplary Victorian war poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” sounds war’s heroism, but it also sounds it out. In doing so, the poem demands an admiring spectatorship even as it remains wary of turning war into a spectator sport.

  • 41 James Friswell (ed.), Songs of the War (London: Ward & Lock, 1855), ii.
  • 42 Martin Tupper, “The Van and the Rear”, A Batch of War Ballads (London: Bosworth, 1854), 6.
  • 43 The Times (25 August 1855), 8. Punch echoed such criticisms; see “The War Poets”, Punch 28 (13 Janu (...)

17The progress of the Crimean war was marked by much poetry that sang of arms and the man in a less equivocal fashion—Gerald Massey’s War Waits (1855), and James Friswell’s anthology, Songs of the War, both of which emphasized “that fund of patriotism which is the safeguard of any kingdom, however mismanaged or misgoverned.”41 Yet many poets who supported the war were intent on highlighting the messiness of the business: Martin Tupper’s “The Van and the Rear” begins “Brilliant troops in proud array,/Thrilling trumpets, rattling drums”, before the rear quickly makes itself heard in the next stanza: “Mangled wretches, horrors dire,/Groans and curses, wounds and woes.”42 Moreover, writers who opposed the war were raising their voices in collections like Ernest Jones’s The Battle-Day and Other Poems (1855), Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell’s Sonnets on the War (1855), and Dobell’s England in Time of War (1856). Even The Times, so often critical of the war, grew impatient with these poetic developments: “Aeschylus fought at Marathon, Milton was the secretary of Cromwell, Goethe a minister of state. Instead of this, what have we now? Poets hiding themselves in holes and corners.”43 This comment is from a review of one of the most important war collections of the period, Tennyson’s first volume of poetry since taking up the mantle of Poet Laureate, Maud and Other Poems (1855).

  • 44 John Addington Symonds, letter to Charlotte Symonds, May 1857; see Herbert M. Schueller & Robert L. (...)
  • 45 Henry and Franklin Lushington, La Nation Boutiquière & Other Poems Chiefly Political and Points of (...)
  • 46 Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Literature (London: Dent, 1908), 312.
  • 47 Tennyson, “Epilogue”, Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, Poems of Tennyson, III, 97.
  • 48 Tennyson, Maud, Poems of Tennyson, II, 513–84.

18The OED’s earliest example of the term “war poem” is a reference to Maud. The example comes from a letter by John Addington Symonds in which he recalled a lecture he attended: “[the speaker] chiefly talked about the two Lushingtons & Maud which he considers a true war poem & praises highly.”44 “True” hints at a debate over values, and the volumes of Henry and Franklin Lushington (friends of Tennyson) offer one side of the argument. In their work, the war poem is an incitement to decisive action: “For a moment, dearly as we love him, let Hamlet stand aside: he has but too much to say in Germany: we want Fortinbras just now.”45 Such positions echoed the views of Carlyle, who in his lecture on “The Hero as Poet” (1841) had explained that “the Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.”46 Tennyson was frequently drawn to this classical model of the poet-warrior, and to a conception of poetry as a form of martial action; as he observed in his Epilogue to The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava, “The song that nerves a nation’s heart/Is in itself a deed.”47 Likewise, the speaker of his monodrama takes up Fortinbras’s tone when he feels able; Maud opens with the protagonist calling for “loud war by land and sea” (I.i.47),48 echoes language and arguments from poems by the Lushingtons and other pro-war collections (war as antidote for domestic commercial greed, as heroic endeavour, as Christian crusade), and ends when he signs up for the army.

  • 49 Tennyson, in conversation with James Knowles; cited in Gordon N. Ray, Tennyson Reads Maud (Vancouve (...)
  • 50 See Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854–1856 (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999)
  • 51 G. C. Swayne, ‘Peace and War: A Dialogue’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 76 (1854), 592.

19And yet, Tennyson was not content to “let Hamlet stand aside”. He saw Maud as “akin to Hamlet,”49 and although the poem’s speaker talks a good fight, he also expresses a need to escape the fighting talk: “let a passionless peace be my lot,/Far-off from the clamour of liars belied in the hubbub of lies” (I.iv.151–2). The poem does not merely reiterate the views of the Lushingtons and the pro-war contingent; it frames them in a dramatic form that asks readers to consider the paucity of the “clamour” alongside the probity of the speaker’s own chatter. Indeed, the speaker’s longing for a critical distance often leads him towards a pointed critical engagement. When, gazing down on a nearby village, he mutters to himself that “Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies as a Czar” (I.iv.110), he draws a comparison between a member of the British public and a Russian leader with whom that public was at war. Nicholas I was widely condemned in the British press as a liar because of his claim to be fighting a holy war, not a war of aggression. But the same might be said of the speaker’s homeland: the pretext for the war was that Britain was protecting the rights of the Greek Christians in Turkey against Russian invasion; the sub-text was that Turkey was a key strategic location for Britain’s imperial commercial holdings in the East.50 As another speaker in Blackwood’s remarked: “Above all, let us eschew cant in giving our reasons for the war. We go to war because Russia is becoming too powerful.”51 War insists upon differentiation, but Maud is also listening out for discomforting alliances.

20Tennyson’s little Hamlet is a “true” Victorian war poem because it acknowledges and explores the warring claims that make the speaker’s own pronouncements part of the viewpoint he criticizes. When he comes across Maud singing “a passionate ballad . . .a martial song” (I.v.165–6), he hears her:

Singing of men that in battle array,
Ready in heart and ready in hand
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.
(I.v.169–72)

21Their land, not our land. The accents of Fortinbras are overheard by an alienated listener, who then begs “silence, beautiful voice”, for “you only trouble the mind/With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,/A glory I shall not find” (180–83). This moment encapsulates the predicament and the achievement of the most enduring Victorian war poetry—a speaker drawn to, yet distrustful of, martial fervour, who aspires to be included in the battle-march, and yet senses the limits of its rhythms (hence the rich tonal ambiguity of “I shall not find”, which sounds at once envious, lonely, critical and proud). What he finds instead, and what we find through him in the poem’s feverish repetitions and echoes, is a disturbing confluence of the language that explores his romantic engagement with Maud with that which charts his public engagement with the war (the name “Maud” itself means “war” or “battle”). Erotic and martial vocabularies frequently overlap, as in the polysemic nature of “dying”, so that we begin to see the speaker’s love for Maud as a kind of death-wish, and his final willingness to “die” for his country not only as an ennobling sacrifice for a cause, but also as a desperate attempt to conduct a courtship by other means. The first glimmer of the speaker’s love-in-madness comes in the poem’s second line when he tells us of the lips of the hollow “dabbled with blood-red heath” (I.i.2); at the end of the poem, when he talks of the “blood-red blossom of war” (III.vi.53), we sense that he is still seeing red. Maud’s final lines contain a strangely enervated music even though the speaker agrees to march to the death. “Their native land” becomes “my native land”:

We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.
(III.v.55–59)

  • 52 Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Present System of Recruiting in the Army (...)
  • 53 See Edgar Shannon, “The Critical Reception of Tennyson’s Maud”, PMLA, 68 (1953), 397–417.

22“We have hearts in a cause” might sound both full- and half-hearted (“a cause” is finally something he can stand for, and yet “a” cause, not “the” cause, suggests that any cause will do). During the 1850s and 60s attention was turning towards enlistment, and, as one official report noted: “few enlist from any real inclination for military life . . .Enlistment is, for the most part, occasioned by want of work—by pecuniary embarrassment—by family quarrels—or by any other difficulties of a private nature.”52 The private difficulties and embarrassments of Maud’s speaker are occasion for the poem’s ending. What we are observing is the progress from private grief to civic responsibility, and—more disturbingly—a link between a patriotic fervour and a pathological fever, and the rhymes in the stanza provide insight into the mental status of a speaker in favour of war at all costs: “still/ill”. Contemporary reviewers disagreed about what position Tennyson was taking in Maud, some arguing that the Laureate was for the Peace party since he allowed a madman to speak in defence of war, others insisting that the war passages were evidence of his support of England’s involvement in the Crimea.53 But Tennyson’s dramatic form is investigating positions, not taking them. His poem is an echo of a war-cry, an echo of questionable fidelity that provokes rather than distils thought.

  • 54 William Morris, “Concerning Geffray Teste Noir”, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Mor (...)

23Maud’s ghost, and the ghost of the Crimean conflict, haunted collections of Victorian poetry after the war. In The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858), William Morris set himself to challenge traditional conceptions of chivalry by mingling a focus on warlike emblems with an attentiveness to another kind of detail. “Concerning Geffray Teste Noir”, for example, begins with a speaker recalling “The dancing trumpet sound, and we went forth;/And my red lion on the spear-head flapped”, but its progression marks a shift from collective battle-charges to isolated waverings, as the earlier excitement of those repeated “and’s turns sour: ‘And I, being faint with smelling the burnt bones,/And very hot with fighting down the street,/And sick of such a life, fell down, with groans/My head went weakly nodding to my feet.’54 The journey from the spear-head to the weakly nodding head is one which has taken account of the publicized horrors of the Crimean war. Similarly, in Morris’s ‘The Wind’ his old knight’s romantic reminiscences are interrupted when “in march’d the ghosts of those that had gone to the war”:

  • 55 Morris, “The Wind”, ibid., 110.

I knew them by the arms that I was used to paint
Upon their long thin shields; but the colours were all grown faint,
And faint upon their banner was Olaf, king and saint.55

  • 56 George Meredith, “Grandfather Bridgeman”, The Poetical Works of George Meredith (London: Constable, (...)

24To recognize the soldiers by the emblems on their shields might imply that their physical injuries render them unrecognizable, as the men carry the scars of battle with them into the world beyond. These dead do not rest easy with their sacrifice, and their march heralds not a glorious remembrance, but a kind of beleaguered trooping of the colours. George Meredith’s “Grandfather Bridgeman”, which he deemed important enough to stand at the head of his collection Modern Love (1862), contains a similar sense of fading splendour. A grandfather reads a letter from his soldier-grandson in the Crimea, lauding his victories and turning to the assembled family to note, “You’ll own war isn’t such humbug: and Glory means something, you see.”56 What they eventually see, though, is another ghost; the letter turns out to be several weeks old, and Tom has been severely wounded during the interim. At the end of the poem he makes his entrance: “Wheeled, pale, in a chair, and shattered, the wreck of their hero was seen;/ The ghost of Tom drawn slow o’er the orchard’s shadowy green.” This shattering, at once physical and emotional, frequently makes itself felt in post-Crimean war poetry, as touchable ghosts hover in the edges of the verse to remind readers of how war might re-figure and disfigure the body.

  • 57 Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University (...)

25Beyond the Crimean War lay the Indian Mutiny, an event that further tested Victorian confidence in its imperial project and the violence that accompanied it. As Gautam Chakravarty has noted, the poetry of the mutiny (unlike novelistic or historical explorations) tended to excise the sequence of causes that led to the popular insurgency and to focus instead on the sufferings of the British.57 This focus again took its bearings from the press. The Cawnpore massacre was covered by The Times in leaders which dwelt on war-torn bodies with unprecedented directness:

  • 58 The Times (17 September 1857), 9.

The women having been stripped naked, beheaded and thrown into a well; the children having been hurled down alive upon the butchered mothers, whose blood yet reeked on their mangled bodies . . .Children have been compelled to eat the quivering flesh of their murdered parents, after which they were literally torn asunder by the laughing fiends who surrounded them.58

  • 59 Mary E. Leslie, “Massacre at Cawnpore, 1857”, Sorrows, Aspirations, and Legends from India (London: (...)
  • 60 Tupper, quoted in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny 1857–1859(...)
  • 61 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Batsfor (...)
  • 62 Christina Rossetti, “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”, Christina Rossetti: The Complete (...)
  • 63 See The Times report on 11 September 1857, 7. Rossetti added a note to the poem in 1875 to acknowle (...)
  • 64 See Matthew Bevis, “Tennyson’s Civil Tongue”, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 7: 3 (November 1999), 113 (...)

26Victorian war poets have been accused of being irresponsibly squeamish about the effects of conflict, yet many poets who responded to the Indian Mutiny should be charged with not being squeamish enough, for their use of the press reports led to poems in which salacious detail served only as an excuse for hysterical cries of retribution. Mary E. Leslie borrowed The Times’ gratuitous “quivering” when drawing attention to “a common grave/Heaped high with quivering, crushed humanity,”59 while Martin Tupper’s poems dwelt on atrocity in order to countenance an equally violent revenge: “Who pulls about the mercy?—the agonized wail of babies hewn piecemeal yet sickens the air.”60 Even before the Cawnpore incident, John Nicholson had suggested “a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi”. After the atrocities, the tone became even more vindictive, and, as one historian has pointed out, “the Cawnpore massacre gave sanction to a retributive savagery which is one of the most shameful episodes in British history.”61 The sanction was upheld by poems like Leslie’s and Tupper’s, although there were other voices that resisted this kind of grimly gleeful baiting. Christina Rossetti’s “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”, as its title implies, tries to get close to the action and dates itself journalistically, yet after an initial reference to how “The swarming howling wretches below/Gained and gained and gained,”62 the focus turns to the last moments of the Skene family inside the tower as they decide to take their own lives rather than die at the hands of the mutineers. The emphasis is on the creation of a desperate dignity, rather than the incitement of a bloodthirsty revenge. Indeed, Rossetti kept the poem in the volume even after she found out that Captain Skene and his wife were actually captured and killed by the sword.63 The violence of the mutiny is also handled with sensitivity in Tennyson’s first volume of Idylls of the King (1859), a collection which sold more than any previous volume of his work, and which dwelt on how imperial aggression might be seen as both the model and the catalyst for the violence it deplored in its colonies.64

  • 65 Herbert Tucker, “Epic”, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, 32.

27Tennyson has frequently been cited as the formative influence on a late-Victorian hymning of empire, but the continuation of his Idylls of the King leads to poems that stage within themselves imperial anxieties as Arthur’s rule is subjected to searching questions. Herbert Tucker has recently observed that: “saddest of all Victorian epics, the Idylls in their gloomy analytic coherence shadow with equal plangency the losses that empire exacts and the downfall that awaits it.”65 This plangency can be sensed in “The Last Tournament” (1871), where Arthur’s imperial project meets with an imperious disobedience; the King insists that his knights do not seek revenge for a mutinous uprising, but they disobey his orders. Looking to the East, the horrors of the Indian Mutiny are recalled, only now it is the imperial state’s violence that is given prominence:

  • 66 Tennyson, “The Last Tournament”, Poems of Tennyson, III, 521–22.

                   [they] roared
And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen;
There trampled out his face from being known,
And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang
Through open doors, and swording right and left
Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled
The tables over and the wines, and slew
Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells,
And all the pavement streamed with massacre:
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,
Which half that autumn night, like the live North,
Red-pulsing up through Alioth and Alcor,
Made all above it, and a hundred meres
About it, as the water Moab saw
Come round by the East, and out beyond them flushed
The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea.
     So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.66

28The sprawling first sentence insists on showing us what Victoria’s little wars might involve. The breathless pace of the violence, accentuated by verbs at the end of run-on lines (“sprang”, “hurled”, “slew”, “saw”, “flushed”), is matched by its savagery. Like the other verbs, we initially expect ‘slew’ to be transitive, but the grammatical shock as we veer into the next line gives gruesome voice to the indiscriminate nature of the killing. What we are asked to dwell on, though, is the monosyllabic drag of the last two lines, isolated on the page, for it is here where imperial supremacy counts the cost of the safety it creates. The callous efficiency of “So” is almost parodic (“so they all lived happily ever after”), before the “But” records a heartbeat that has become distempered by the order it has established.

  • 67 Timothy Lovelace, The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry (New York & London: Routle (...)
  • 68 See Peter Burroughs, “An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868”, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds.), The (...)
  • 69 See Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 77 and 162.
  • 70 Robert MacDonald, Personal Narrative of Military Travel and Adventure in Turkey and Persia (Edinbur (...)

29Timothy Lovelace has recently attended to Tennyson’s meditations on the double-edged nature of battle-wrath (both its honourable and destructive potential) and noted that “the glories of battle often appear on the perimeters of Tennyson’s pictures, his center of focus is usually rusting swords, vales of bones, or failing kingdoms.”67 This focus was to become an increasingly central aspect of late Victorian poetry, as the glories of battle gave way to a more sustained look at the complex figure of the soldier. Often labelled as a career for malcontents or misfits, the stigma of soldiering had a long history. Pay and conditions were very poor, and the iniquity of the purchase system was one of many reflections of class prejudice operating at all levels of the military life.68 Wellington referred to his men at Waterloo as “the scum of the earth”, and the rank-and-file were frequently associated with alcoholism and sexual licentiousness (brothels provided cheap spirits; by 1862, a third of home-based troops were hospitalized on account of venereal disease).69 At the mid-century, Robert MacDonald recalled his experience as a recruiter: “it was only in the haunts of dissipation or inebriation, and among the lowest dregs of society, that I met with anything like success.”70

  • 71 The Times (22 October 1856), 6.
  • 72 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, ed. Peter Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 331.
  • 73 Francis Hastings Doyle, “The Private of the Buffs”, in Edmund Clarence Stedman (ed.), A Victorian A (...)

30After the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, the dregs were invested with a new dignity. An enthusiastic reporter for The Times noted: “Any hostility which may have existed in bygone days towards the army has long since passed away. The red coat of the soldier is honoured throughout the country.”71 This is overpitched, but it highlights a shift. Samuel Smiles honoured the red-coat in his own way by ending Self-Help (1859) with examples of the soldier as “the true gentleman”, referring to the rank-and-file as “rough, gallant fellows” and pointing out that in the war and the mutiny “even the common soldiers proved themselves gentlemen under their trials.”72 Smiles’s vocabulary hovers between old and new conceptions of the soldier, but his sense of the figure’s “trials” was shared by many, and growing calls for army reform and improvement of the soldier’s lot culminated in the abolishment of the purchase system in 1871. These revaluations found their way into poetry; Francis Hastings Doyle, who in 1867 succeeded Arnold as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote a number of poems on the nameless men who fought in Victoria’s name, and his “The Private of the Buffs”, like many other pieces, focused on the soldier as an individual, rather than as part of a collective—“poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught,/Bewildered, and alone.”73 Like Smiles’s “rough gallant”, this “low-born” but “untaught” hero came to stand as a kind of synecdoche for war itself: savage yet chivalric, uncivilized yet the defender of civilization.

  • 74 See Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain”, English Historic (...)
  • 75 See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities, 19 (...)
  • 76 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Soldier”, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillip (...)

31These developments intersected with the proselytizing tenor of British imperial rhetoric as Christian militarism captured the public imagination and helped to produce a new kind of soldier-hero.74 Embracing the purpose of God and the doom assigned became a recurring feature of the poetry of soldiering. Military adventure was fused with religious narratives, and prominent figures like Havelock and Gordon came to embody a cluster of virtues with roots in nineteenth-century evangelical imperialism.75 This diverse range of vocabularies (soldier as degenerate malcontent, as stoic victim, as Christian hero) permeates Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “The Soldier” (1885). It begins by asking, “Yes. Why do we all, seeing of a soldier, bless him? Bless/Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,/But frail clay, nay but foul clay.”76 The move from “frail” to “foul” is a gesture to earlier conceptions of the soldier, but the answering voice is swift:

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;
He of all can reave a rope best. There he bides in bliss
Now, and seeing somewhere some man do all that man can do,
For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry “O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
Were I come o’er again” cries Christ “it should be this.”

32To envisage life as a form of “war” and “soldiering”, and the job as a representation of “all that man can do”, is to see the soldier as both Everyman and Christ-like martyr. The act of soldiering on is accorded a transcendental dignity, for the soldier’s death (hinted at in talk of a “rope” and “his neck”) now intimates resurrection. The journey of “foul clay” in this sonnet is the rite of passage of the soldier in Victoria’s reign: from dens of prostitution to stages of pilgrimage, from inebriation to incarnation.

II

  • 77 Rudyard Kipling, “The Instructor”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder & St (...)
  • 78 See Philip Warner, Dervish: The Rise and Fall of an African Empire (London: Macdonald, 1973), 134.
  • 79 Melton Prior, Campaigns of a War Correspondent (London: Arnold, 1912), 287.

33The century’s closing decades witnessed a different kind of soldierly apotheosis, one of the most enduring bequests from Victorian poets to twentieth-century writers. When Rudyard Kipling’s soldier in “The Instructor” notes that “There’s one above is greater than us all,”77 he is referring not to God, but to the bullet that flies just above his crouching body. This war poetry breathes a different air; the soldier is no longer, technically speaking, a redcoat (Hopkins’s poem was written in the last year that red coats were worn in battle),78 but wears khaki for protective coloration. The soldier comes of age in Victorian poetry and culture as the methods of warfare themselves reach a terrifying maturity, and the figure now enjoys a new kind of privilege as he completes the metamorphosis from scapegoat to underdog. This focus on the soldier owed itself again, in part, to the progress of the newspapers and to the public’s hunger for news of war in particular (between 1880 and 1900 the number of newspapers doubled, and during the Franco-Prussian war alone the circulation of the Daily News trebled). As one correspondent recalled, the demand for war reports was also a demand for news of the “sweating, swearing, grimy, dirty, fearless and generous Tommy.”79

  • 80 J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 2.

34Tommy Atkins was heard as well as seen. The Victorian music halls were, as J. A. Hobson argued in The Psychology of Jingoism, “a very serviceable engine for generating military passion,”80 but they were also a space in which imperial jingoism and the official line on war might be questioned. The term “jingoism” was the outgrowth of a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt (sung by G. H. Macdermott) from 1878, the chorus of which ran:

  • 81 G. W. Hunt, “Macdermott’s War Song”, reprinted in The Music Hall Songster (London: Fortney, 1893).

We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too. We’ve fought the bear before, and while we’re Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople.81

35Voices like this were common, but recent work on the music hall has pointed to other tones that need to be heard alongside them in order to appreciate the complexity of late Victorian imaginings of war. Macdermott’s rival, Herbert Campbell, often performed another song on the same bill, this one written by Henry Pettit, with the chorus:

  • 82 Henry Pettit, quoted in Peter Davison, “A Briton True: A Short Account of Patriotic Songs and Verse (...)

I don’t want to fight, I’ll be slaughtered if I do!
I’ll change my togs and sell my kit and pop my rifle too!
I don’t like the war, I ain’t no Briton true
And I’d let the Russians have Constantinople.82

  • 83 Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgr (...)
  • 84 The working-class inflection of this voice is also important, as Attridge explains: “A growing reco (...)
  • 85 J. B. Booth, A Pink ’Un Remembers (London: Laurie, 1937), 123.

36This emphasis on the “I” lurking inside the “We”, and on a man who insists on being representative only of feelings of isolation, can be heard in different ways. Steve Attridge suggests that this speaker gave audiences a chance to laugh at the unwilling recruit, thereby offering “tangential support for strident imperial tone of Macdermott’s act,”83 but he might also be heard as a spokesman for the disaffected, a man who has the courage to say what others are thinking, and who questions a military ethos even as he feels compelled to submit to it.84 Late-Victorian war songs often manage to combine a sense of the “we” and the “I”; they have something of the swagger of military marches, but the burdens of their refrains start to feel like solitary whistlings in the dark as the century nears its close. The soldier’s pluck was no longer to be condescended to as a reason to avoid his disconsolate pleadings. J. B. Booth acknowledged the significance of these voices when he observed: “Tommy moaned all through his sing-songs.”85

  • 86 Kipling, “Tommy”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 399.
  • 87 John Macleay (ed.), War Songs and Ballads of Martial Life (London: Scott, 1900), p. xxvi–xxvii.

37The most accomplished translation of Tommy’s moaning into metre was effected by Kipling, and for over thirty years after its publication his Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses (1892) was the most popular book of verse in the English-speaking world. Not against war, but against complacency about what war entails, his dramatic monologues took their lead from the music hall to breathe new life into Atkins. Situating himself between wholly dignified and derogatory vocabularies, his “Tommy” insisted: “We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too/But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you.”86 One contemporary anthologist summed up the remarkable Tommy as “humanly full of discontent and grievance, with no more love than stay-at-home folk for blistering marches and an empty belly, fonder of life than most, he is a great and honourable fighter, gay in the face of a soldier’s death, and a broad humorist in time of peril”, before noting that “Kipling handles honour and glory with no hint of awe.”87 Kipling was responsibly wary of awe, of the way it can act as a refusal to dwell on what honour and glory can cost its recipient, but he was also cognisant of how the “broad humorist” might offer a certain kind of disingenuous consolation, whereby the soldier becomes a mere clown, somebody whose joking might deflect attention from his suffering or lead some to reflect that he exists solely for their entertainment. Accordingly, his Tommies have a rueful wit, a trench humour that is burdened by an awareness of what war can inflict even as it refuses to bow under the strain of that burden. This tone is frequently heard in the soldier’s chorus, where the traditional sense of the form as a collective utterance is permeated by a dissentient isolation, an elegiac moan that runs through the sing-song. In “That Day” (1895), for instance, the chorus becomes a form of torment:

  • 88 Kipling, “That Day”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 437.

Now there ain’t no chorus ’ere to give,
     Nor there ain’t no band to play;
An’ I wish I was dead ’fore I done what I did,
     Or seen what I seed that day!88

  • 89 Daniel Karlin, in Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford (...)

38Daniel Karlin has astutely observed that “solidarity with one’s kind is the most precious gift in Kipling’s world . . .But Kipling’s emblem is the Cat that Walked by Himself.”89 Kipling’s soldier is awkwardly positioned between solitude and solidarity. Very much his own man, yet also fearful of betraying or dishonouring his comrades, he frequently speaks with regret about what collective endeavour might encourage in war, even as he acknowledges the longing for community that war creates. These divided impulses are heard here, in a chorus that laments the lack of a chorus, and in lines that express both a loneliness and a need to be alone.

39Kipling’s poems often bring into prominence a particular strength of Victorian war poetry: a desire to dispel illusions, alongside an attempt to keep disillusion at bay. One means of effecting such balance is through the double-jointed nature of the dramatic monologue, which allows us to sense another kind of eloquence and viewpoint operating behind the speaker. “The Young British Soldier” is a characteristic example of Kipling’s dexterity; spoken by an old soldier to a new recruit going out to India, the poem ends:

  • 90 Kipling, “The Young British Soldier”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 418.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
     An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
     So-oldier of the Queen!90

40On the one hand, Kipling’s ingenuity with accent helps to accentuate the old man’s uncompromising perspective; “Jest roll” turns “just” into “jest”, as if to suggest that in this arena justice has become a joke, while “your Gawd” whittles down heavenly comfort by pairing a local pronunciation with a disturbingly localized pronoun—“your Gawd” seems oddly uncollaborative (even question-begging) at such a crucial juncture. On the other hand, the poet’s craft hints at the limits of this perspective: “so-oldier” drags it out of him, for “so old” is this soldier that his scepticism about war has degenerated into a luxurious cynicism, as instanced by the first word of the stanza: “When” should read “If” (after all, this speaker has survived). The silent young auditor of this dramatic monologue might be forgiven for feeling that the experienced old-timer is parading his worldliness, showing off while showing him the ropes.

41The imperative to “go like a soldier” also manages to hover between a sardonic and an ennobling tone. The speaker can be heard as a disillusioned commentator here, drawing attention to how a soldier’s dying for his country is often an expedient, messy suicide. In contrast to a classical emphasis on the importance of a proper burial, we are left lingering on “remains”, a gruesome decaying from verb to noun. And yet, Kipling’s form contains within it another sound: the thrice-repeated “Go, go, go like a soldier” (itself containing a set of three), might also be heard as a dignified burial ritual of sorts, the repetitions aligning themselves with the three volleys traditionally fired over a soldier’s grave by his comrades. And that final metrical swooping on “of” is a commitment to the pride of belonging. Like so many of Kipling’s war poems, the speaker’s very insistence on keeping a stiff upper lip is what lends the piece its air of vulnerability. Such richly compounded accents bespeak a poetic fighting talk that, although it may include patriotic and militaristic zeal, also moves beyond it.

  • 91 For a representative selection, see Elleke Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial (...)
  • 92 See, for instance, William Ernest Henley (ed.), Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys (London: Dav (...)
  • 93 Henry Newbolt, “Vitaï Lampada”, first published in Admirals All and Other Verses (London: Mathews, (...)

42Kipling was an important influence on war poetry of the 1890s, although many poets tended to take their cue from his general defences of the empire, rather than from the more provocative insinuations of his soldier-speakers.91 The 1890s saw the publication of more anthologies of popular war poetry than any previous decade, and much of the writing in these collections does not ring true to the complex achievements of the age.92 Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” was much anthologized, and its refrain, “Play up! play up! and play the game!”93 is representative of the kind of imperial tub-thumping that spoke of war as a public-school cricket match in the colonies: “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight—/Ten to make and the match to win—”. Yet despite this “breathless hush” and the aspiration towards indefatigable grandeur in the refrain, there is something disconcertingly shrill in the tone of this poem and others like it, as if the poet doth protest too much about the nobility and gentlemanliness of war. At the beginning of the new century the Edinburgh Review looked back over the Victorian period and suggested that recent attempts to glorify war were actually reactionary responses to a much more widespread phenomenon in poetry and culture: an increasingly modern nervousness about how and whether war could be justified. Questioning a “forcible-feeble kind” of war poetry, and contrasting the present time with “a hundred years ago [when] poets were satisfied with the simple motive of their country’s triumph”, the reviewer explained that there was now a desire to search for the grounds of war:

  • 94 “War and Poetry”, in Edinburgh Review, 40, 50–51, and 53–54.

This is perhaps one of many signs of an increasing contradiction between the fact of war and the conscience of civilized humanity . . .The actual vision of battle does not seem to inspire poetry . . .The poet who devotes himself to celebrate acts of war, although his art may be redeemed if he can reveal the soul of good in things evil, does nevertheless choose a lower region when he might inhabit a higher.94

  • 95 See Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2002).

43This higher region is what many Victorian poets had been trying to inhabit for some time, a poetic domain in which an “actual vision of battle” is complemented by an attentiveness to what occurs in and around the battle’s edges, and in which celebration is complicated by meditation. This reviewer was writing when “the fact of war” was highly prominent; the Boer War (the longest, bloodiest and most expensive war ever fought by the Victorian army) had just ended, and had given rise to unprecedented modern “evils”—civilian casualties, guerrilla warfare, and concentration camps.95

  • 96 A. C. Swinburne, “The Transvaal”, The Times (11 October 1899), 7.
  • 97 William Ernest Henley, “Remonstrance”, first published in For England’s Sake: Verses and Songs in T (...)
  • 98 See, for instance, J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Nisbet, 1902).
  • 99 W. H. Colby, The Echo (13 October 1899).
  • 100 M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge, 122.
  • 101 Thomas Hardy, quoted in Kathryn R. King and William W. Morgan, “Hardy and The Boer War: The Public (...)

44The forcible-feeble brigade was quick to support the war. Swinburne’s sonnet, “The Transvaal”, was published in The Times a day after war was declared, and ended with the cry: “Strike, England, and strike home.”96 William Ernest Henley followed suit; the first poem in his next collection, “Remonstrance”, borrowed Swinburne’s line for its own ending.97 But this line contains within it an unwitting pun as if in remonstration (to “strike home” may also be to strike at home), and other writers were increasingly drawing attention to the way in which a tyrannical militarism abroad was not only at odds with how modern liberal Britain wished to perceive itself, but also an emblem of the true state of the country.98 W. H. Colby accordingly took Swinburne’s line in another direction in his poetic contribution to the debate: “Where are the dogs agape with jaws afoam?/Where are the wolves? Look, England, look at home.”99 The emphasis on the material and moral damage inflicted upon those who waged and won wars (as well as upon those who lost them) was pronounced. As Van Wyk Smith notes: “opponents of war managed to put their case more volubly, more insistently, and to a much larger audience . . .than in any previous war.”100 This is undoubtedly true, but two of the most distinguished war poets of the late Victorian period (Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman) were intent on forging a tone that expressed something other than voluble insistence. When Hardy complained that bellicose war poetry tended to “throw into the shade works that breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit,”101 he was not defending anything as simplistic as “anti-war poetry”. Rather, he was defending the need for another kind of accent in poetry about war. When poems against war themselves take on a warring tone (Colby’s lines above are an example of this; his poetic questions are merely rhetorical), they might be said to become part of the problem they anatomize. Hardy and Housman were more circumspect about the seductive pull of fighting talk, and aware of the ease with which it could generate an oppositional voice that was implicated in the stridency it condemned.

  • 102 Hardy, “Embarcation”, Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 20 (...)
  • 103 “English Patriotic Poetry”, Quarterly Review 192 (1900), 526 and 536. For another contemporary revi (...)

45Hardy’s war poetry takes another kind of breath; in his poems one feels that marching rhythms might at any time be given their marching orders. In “Embarcation”, the first in his series of “War Poems” to be included in Poems of the Past and Present (1901), we learn that “deckward tramp the bands.”102 “Tramp”, not “march”—even the soldiers seem unable to pick up their feet, and Hardy’s metrical feet frequently display a similar recalcitrance. An article in the Quarterly Review in 1900 noted that patriotic poetry had been changing its tune. From Tennyson onwards, Victorian poetry “has, perhaps, here and there a somewhat uncertain sound, as though feeling its way . . .the patriotic fervour of our forefathers, is exchanged for a limping jolt.”103 This uncertain sound resonates throughout Hardy’s work. Rather than absorbing themselves in battle, his war poems tend to dwell on scenes of anticipation or aftermath, either gathering a kind of reluctant breath for what is to come, or stuttering over a past that refuses to go away. Take the close of “The Man He Killed” (1902), where a soldier dwells on the whys and wherefores of battle:

  • 104 Hardy, “The Man He Killed”, Hardy: Complete Poems, 287.

     ‘I shot him dead because—
     Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
     That’s clear enough; although
     “He thought he’d ”list, perhaps,
     Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
     No other reason why.
     “Yes; quaint and curious war is!
     You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
     Or help to half-a-crown.”104

46Class solidarity across a national divide is part of what makes war, rather than the “foe”, feel like the enemy here. Despite the speaker’s awareness of division, the internal and terminal rhymes in the first stanza (“because/because/he was/he was”, and “foe/so/foe/although”) give voice to a will that strives to locate its identity within partnerships. The doubled-up grammar echoes this feeling, as the phrase “Was out of work” looks back to the “I” of the previous line, and forward to the man who sold “his” traps, not fully able to distinguish between the two men even as a distinction is being formulated. The final stanza is characteristic of Hardy’s eerie endgames: its release from the broken rhythms of the previous stanzas should come as something of a relief, yet the acquired ease of the lines is precisely what is disturbing about them. The speaker could sound chirpy, uttering his conclusion with a shrug of the shoulders rather than with a belaboured sigh. Indeed, “quaint” and “curious” seem oddly cosy, as if the speaker is working too hard to suppress other kinds of adjective. It is as though his killing during the war has desensitized him, rendered him unable to weigh up the significance of his actions. This is a portrait not of the soldier as either victim or victor, but of the victor himself as a victim—seeking a numbness in rhythm and a shelter in euphemism. Hardy’s war poems frequently end with this kind of blank stare; war has inflicted itself on the fabric of the poem’s attenuated form, rather than being something that the form describes.

  • 105 A. E. Housman, “1887”, The Poems of A. E. Housman, ed. Archie Burnett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 200 (...)

47A. E. Housman was another who was intent on shaping poems that were not straightforwardly pro- or anti-war, but that could muster the poise to count costs alongside blessings. Even before the Boer War he was mulling over what it might mean to fight for Queen and country. “1887”, the opening poem of A Shropshire Lad (1896), plumbs the depths of the phrase “God save the Queen” in order to consider the need for the soldiers, those other kinds of saviour “who shared the work with God.”105 Such wry observations do not quite toe the patriotic line, but nor do they mock it. In Housman’s work, the call of battle is neither wholly championed nor belittled; “XXXV” in Shropshire Lad is representative of the poet’s divided allegiances, and of those of Victorian war poetry more generally, so I quote it in full:

  • 106 Housman, Poems of A. E. Housman, 36.

On the idle hill of summer,
     Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
     Drumming like a noise in dreams.
Far and near and low and louder
     On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
     Soldiers marching, all to die.
East and west on fieds forgotten
     Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
     None that go return again.
Far the calling bugles hollo, l
     High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
     Woman bore me, I will rise.106

  • 107 Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (London: Macmillan, 1978), (...)

48In his study of the literature of war, Andrew Rutherford quotes Arnold Kettle’s assertion that “the refusal to be heroic may be very human, but it is also less than human” before noting that “literature which explores this paradox deserves more critical attention than it currently receives”. The endorsement of the quiet life in the pastoral code should not play down the heroic life of action, he explains, because “heroic virtues are needed to protect the innocence of the pastoral world from the violence and evil which would otherwise destroy it.”107 Victorian war poetry is often responsive to this insight, and Housman’s speaker on the idle hill acknowledges even as he would seem to resist it. The poem is a rich compound of competing voices; the lines “Dear to friends and food for powder,/Soldiers marching, all to die”, for instance, play off two of the most renowned commentators on war’s absurdity and its necessity, Falstaff and Hotspur. The first allows room for Falstaff’s sense of the hollowness of war in his comment on the soldiers as mere “food for powder” (1 Henry IV 4.2.62), yet the second is perhaps responsive to Hotspur’s sense of the honour of war in his call to the men, “die all, die merrily” (4.1.135). Neither voice is fully persuasive (Falstaff can sound expediently unprincipled, and Hotspur blithely inhumane), but their dialogue stages questions that Housman is frequently intent upon asking about war. Like the speaker of Maud, haunted by the march “with banner and bugle and fife”, this speaker’s move to rise manages to sound both decided and exhausted, and the call of the bugles is itself rendered ambiguous as Housman’s arch rhyme (“hollo/follow”) gets to work on it; within the greeting “hollo” one begins to hear something “hollow”. Indeed, it is not clear what the speaker’s “rising” portends—rising up to join the soldiers, or rising against them by moving further away.

  • 108 Geoffrey Hill, “‘I in Another Place’: Homage to Keith Douglas”, Stand, 6: 4 (1964–5), 7.
  • 109 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 282.

49Geoffrey Hill has questioned the achievement of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry by suggesting that it “applies a balm of generalized sorrow at a point where the particulars of experience should outsmart that kind of consolation.”108 One of the strengths of Housman’s poem is that it breathes an air of “generalized sorrow” without feeling complacent or merely luxurious. His speaker may perhaps be envious of the sleep of those dead who are unperturbed by noises in their dreams, but “Lovely lads and dead and rotten” also conveys both pity and anger, a feeling that the particulars of experience are not to be tidied up into wholly consolatory patterns. This poem, and the one by Hardy, were both immensely popular in the trenches during the First World War; as Paul Fussell has argued, the work of these two poets in particular “anticipates [and] even helps to determine the imaginative means by which the war was conceived.”109 But the richness of this work owes much in turn to the searchings of earlier Victorian war poetry, a poetry that—in its refusal to provide a ringing endorsement of war even as it remained wary of the dangers of that refusal—offered itself as bequest and as monitory force.

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Notes

1 ’This article first appeared as ’Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I thank Oxford University Press for their permission to re-publish the article here.

2 See The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. III, ed. Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 178.

3 Browning, “Incident of the French Camp”, ibid., 197.

4 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918; repr. London: Penguin, 1986), 266.

5 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p. ix.

6 See, for instance, Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1998), 26–27, and Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1980), 16.

7 M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 310.

8 “War poetry” is not accorded a chapter (or even an index citation) in either Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), or in Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Anthony H. Harrison (eds.), A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Instead, the emphasis is on patriotism; see Tricia Cootens, “Victorian poetry and patriotism”, in The Cambridge Companion, 255–79.

9 John Peck, War, The Army and Victorian Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. xiii.

10 Edward Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World; from Marathon to Waterloo, vol. I (London: Bentley, 1851), p. iii-iv.

11 See Robert Giddings, Imperial Echoes: Eye-Witness Accounts of Victoria’s Little Wars (London: Cooper, 1996), p. xvi.

12 See Max Arthur, Symbol of Courage: A History of the Victoria Cross (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2004).

13 Wilfred Owen, quoted in Hynes, A War Imagined, 246.

14 Punch 28 (17 February 1855), 64.

15 Matthew Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature”, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. I, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 23.

16 Arnold, ibid., 24.

17 Arnold, ibid., 32.

18 Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems” (1853), The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1979), 654.

19 Arnold, “Dover Beach”, ibid., 254.

20 Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature”, Complete Prose, vol. I, 28.

21 Matthew Campbell, “Poetry and War”, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 65.

22 Arnold, “Preface”, Poems of Arnold, 657 and 659.

23 Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Grove, 1986), 186, 188 & 190.

24 Weil, ibid., 189.

25 Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum, Poems of Arnold, 345–46.

26 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), 216.

27 See Matthew Paul Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984).

28 See Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey, The War Correspondents: The Crimean War (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994).

29 William Howard Russell, in The Times (12 February 1855), 9.

30 Russell, The Times (25 November 1854), 9.

31 “War and Poetry”, Edinburgh Review 196 (July 1902), 53.

32 Westland Marston, The Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade (London: Mitchell, 1855), 8.

33 See Geoffrey Regan, Someone Had Blundered: A Historical Survey of Military Incompetence (London: Batsford, 1987), 192–208.

34 T. S. Eliot, quoted in Dominic Hibberd (ed.), Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1981), 52.

35 Russell, The Times (14 November 1854), 7.

36 Trudi Tate, “On Not Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade”, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds.), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2003), 166.

37 Tennyson, letter of 23 January 1855, probably to Sydney Dobell; see Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon (eds), The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982–90), II, 104.

38 Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, The Poems of Tennyson, vol. II, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, (London: Longman, 1987), 511–13.

39 Tennyson, quoted in Matthew Bevis (ed.), Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 84.

40 W. F. Rawnsley, quoted in Bevis (ed.), Lives, 83.

41 James Friswell (ed.), Songs of the War (London: Ward & Lock, 1855), ii.

42 Martin Tupper, “The Van and the Rear”, A Batch of War Ballads (London: Bosworth, 1854), 6.

43 The Times (25 August 1855), 8. Punch echoed such criticisms; see “The War Poets”, Punch 28 (13 January 1854), 17.

44 John Addington Symonds, letter to Charlotte Symonds, May 1857; see Herbert M. Schueller & Robert L. Peters (eds), The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3 vols (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1967), I, 105.

45 Henry and Franklin Lushington, La Nation Boutiquière & Other Poems Chiefly Political and Points of War (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), p. xxv.

46 Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Literature (London: Dent, 1908), 312.

47 Tennyson, “Epilogue”, Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, Poems of Tennyson, III, 97.

48 Tennyson, Maud, Poems of Tennyson, II, 513–84.

49 Tennyson, in conversation with James Knowles; cited in Gordon N. Ray, Tennyson Reads Maud (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1968), 23.

50 See Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854–1856 (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999).

51 G. C. Swayne, ‘Peace and War: A Dialogue’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 76 (1854), 592.

52 Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Present System of Recruiting in the Army (London: 1861), xvii.

53 See Edgar Shannon, “The Critical Reception of Tennyson’s Maud”, PMLA, 68 (1953), 397–417.

54 William Morris, “Concerning Geffray Teste Noir”, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 76 and 78.

55 Morris, “The Wind”, ibid., 110.

56 George Meredith, “Grandfather Bridgeman”, The Poetical Works of George Meredith (London: Constable, 1912), 125.

57 Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 107.

58 The Times (17 September 1857), 9.

59 Mary E. Leslie, “Massacre at Cawnpore, 1857”, Sorrows, Aspirations, and Legends from India (London: 1858); reprinted in Donald Thomas (ed.), The Everyman Book of Victorian Verse: The Pre-Raphaelites to the Nineties (London: Dent, 1993), 161.

60 Tupper, quoted in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, English Historical Writing on the Indian Mutiny 1857–1859 (Calcutta: World Press, 1979), 259.

61 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Batsford, 1976), 224.

62 Christina Rossetti, “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”, Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump and Betty Flowers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 20.

63 See The Times report on 11 September 1857, 7. Rossetti added a note to the poem in 1875 to acknowledge the factual inaccuracy.

64 See Matthew Bevis, “Tennyson’s Civil Tongue”, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 7: 3 (November 1999), 113–25.

65 Herbert Tucker, “Epic”, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, 32.

66 Tennyson, “The Last Tournament”, Poems of Tennyson, III, 521–22.

67 Timothy Lovelace, The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry (New York & London: Routledge, 2003), 165.

68 See Peter Burroughs, “An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868”, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 160-88, and John R. Reed, “Military”, in Herbert Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 183–93.

69 See Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 77 and 162.

70 Robert MacDonald, Personal Narrative of Military Travel and Adventure in Turkey and Persia (Edinburgh: Black, 1859), 296.

71 The Times (22 October 1856), 6.

72 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, ed. Peter Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 331.

73 Francis Hastings Doyle, “The Private of the Buffs”, in Edmund Clarence Stedman (ed.), A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895).

74 See Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain”, English Historical Review 86 (January 1971), 46–72.

75 See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities, 1994), 79–155.

76 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Soldier”, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 168.

77 Rudyard Kipling, “The Instructor”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940; repr. 1960), 472.

78 See Philip Warner, Dervish: The Rise and Fall of an African Empire (London: Macdonald, 1973), 134.

79 Melton Prior, Campaigns of a War Correspondent (London: Arnold, 1912), 287.

80 J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 2.

81 G. W. Hunt, “Macdermott’s War Song”, reprinted in The Music Hall Songster (London: Fortney, 1893).

82 Henry Pettit, quoted in Peter Davison, “A Briton True: A Short Account of Patriotic Songs and Verse and Popular Entertainment”, Alta (Spring 1970), 216.

83 Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 30.

84 The working-class inflection of this voice is also important, as Attridge explains: “A growing recognition of Tommy Atkins’s background grew contemporaneously with an awareness of the effects of material deprivation among the working class . . .The soldier figure is both accommodated and distanced, supported and derided, an expression of unity and of class antagonism”. Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity, 69 and 43.

85 J. B. Booth, A Pink ’Un Remembers (London: Laurie, 1937), 123.

86 Kipling, “Tommy”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 399.

87 John Macleay (ed.), War Songs and Ballads of Martial Life (London: Scott, 1900), p. xxvi–xxvii.

88 Kipling, “That Day”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 437.

89 Daniel Karlin, in Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xxi.

90 Kipling, “The Young British Soldier”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 418.

91 For a representative selection, see Elleke Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

92 See, for instance, William Ernest Henley (ed.), Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys (London: David Nutt, 1892), which focuses exclusively on “the beauty and blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion”, vii.

93 Henry Newbolt, “Vitaï Lampada”, first published in Admirals All and Other Verses (London: Mathews, 1897); reprinted in Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing, 287.

94 “War and Poetry”, in Edinburgh Review, 40, 50–51, and 53–54.

95 See Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2002).

96 A. C. Swinburne, “The Transvaal”, The Times (11 October 1899), 7.

97 William Ernest Henley, “Remonstrance”, first published in For England’s Sake: Verses and Songs in Time of War (London: David Nutt, 1900); reprinted in Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing, 283.

98 See, for instance, J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Nisbet, 1902).

99 W. H. Colby, The Echo (13 October 1899).

100 M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge, 122.

101 Thomas Hardy, quoted in Kathryn R. King and William W. Morgan, “Hardy and The Boer War: The Public Poet in Spite of Himself”, Victorian Poetry 17 (1979), 66–84.

102 Hardy, “Embarcation”, Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 86.

103 “English Patriotic Poetry”, Quarterly Review 192 (1900), 526 and 536. For another contemporary review which noticed a change in tune, see J. A. R. Marriott, “The Imperial Note in Victorian Poetry”, Nineteenth Century 48 (1900), 236–48.

104 Hardy, “The Man He Killed”, Hardy: Complete Poems, 287.

105 A. E. Housman, “1887”, The Poems of A. E. Housman, ed. Archie Burnett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 3.

106 Housman, Poems of A. E. Housman, 36.

107 Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (London: Macmillan, 1978), 2 and 9.

108 Geoffrey Hill, “‘I in Another Place’: Homage to Keith Douglas”, Stand, 6: 4 (1964–5), 7.

109 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 282.

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Matthew Bevis, « Warring Claims: Victorian Poetry and Conflict »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 66 Automne | 2007, mis en ligne le 16 décembre 2021, consulté le 19 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/10520 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.10520

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Matthew Bevis

BEVIS Matthew is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. He had published widely on Victorian literature, including a book on Tennyson in the Pickering and Chatto Victorian Lives series (2003). His book on the relations between oratory and literature in the nineteenth centry, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (2007).

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